Healthcare from the perspective of a clinician encompassing both the capture of the clinical viewpoint as well as the technology to help clinicians capture knowledge at the point of care
The thoughts expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Nuance

In fact some of this will add fuel to the HR408 Act Spending Reduction Act of 2011 (the text of this can be found here). It is a far reaching bill attempting to reign in spending to the tune of 2.5 Trillion and includes several elements focusing on repeal of Healthcare IT stimulus spending S:302 which focuses on repealing the HITECH funding and investment - there was a good analysis in Health Data Management GOP Bill Puts Meaningful Use, HITECH Act in Peril that highlights the murky nature of the impact of this legislation.

Like almost all science that gets reported in the general media, there is more to this study than what is described in the headlines and news reports. The study was published in a prestigious medical journal by two Stanford researchers. The implementation of the research methods they used appears to be sound.

But as he points out there are serious limitations to this type of study based on the type of study and the data resources, in particular the study "used a data source collected for other purposes and he highlighted the following limitations:

A frequent challenge - the study looks at correlation, which does not mean causality

No detail of the EHR's being used and if they had any decision support in place relative the the quality measures

THe care assessed was individual episodes of care and improvements in actual quality occur over multiple episodes of care (the longitudinal medical record)

Data analyzed was old (2005 - 2007) and in any field of technology including Healthcare Informatics this is old

No indication of the training and skill set of the clinicians being assessed and success and failure fo EHR's goes far beyond the technology and is closely tied to implementation and training

And there was extensive discussion that pointed to other articles and studies highlighting the benefits and in particular emphasize how early we are in this process. I imagine that for several other key inventions there was a similar response:

The Electric light bulb

Telephone

This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.

First, and most important, the current article tells us nothing about which CDS guidelines were implemented in the systems that they studied. Practices and EHRs vary considerably in the number and type of CDS rules that they implement, and we do not know whether the CDS rules implemented by the practicesthat participated in the surveys addressed any of the 20 quality indicators evaluated by Romano and Stafford.

Second, the current study and Garg and coauthors' review considered very different categories of guidelines. Most of the guidelines (60%) in Romano and Stafford's study concern medication use; none of them deals with immunizations or screening tests, which were the dominant subjects in the studies reviewed by Garg et al.3 Furthermore, in our experience, care providers are less willing to accept and act on automated reminders about initiating long-term drug therapy than about ordering a single test or an immunization.

The third difference is that the current study examined the outcome of a single visit, while most of the trials reviewed by Garg and colleagues observed the cumulative effect of the CDS system on a patient over many visits.

Finally, the data available from NAMCS/NHAMCS may be limited compared with what is contained in most of the EHRs used for Garg and coauthors' trials. For example, the NAMCS/NHAMCS instruments have roomto record only 8 medications, even though at least 17% of individuals older than 65 years take 10 or more medications.

The road to digitization of healthcare is long and filled with many ups and downs. This study adds the overall knowledge but should be taken in the context of what was studied and its contribution to guiding us down the correct path and not, as some would believe> halting the journey and returning to the dark ages of pen and paper.

>>>>Now mobile developers are able to quickly and easily leverage the powerful dictation and voice search capabilities at the core of the successful Dragon Dictationand Dragon Search apps, as well as Nuance’s trusted Vocalizer text-to-speech (TTS).

In line with the explosion of mobile applications and similar to the model for Apple's Developer Application (XCode) the SDK is available (for both Apple iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch iOS 4.0 and for Android v2.1 and higher. Supporting multiple languages the offering provides instant access to "easy-to-integrate prepackaged wrappers and widgets for rapid inclusion of voice recognition into their applications, all through a self-service website. Developers also have access to an on-line forum for additional support, a variety of code samples and full documentation."

And all for free! Leveling the developer playing field and fostering innovation of speech enabled apps so that as Michael Thompson, SVP and GM of Nuance Mobile Division put it:

are intending to take advantage of the federal incentive payments for adoption and meaningful use of certified EHR's
And Dr David Blumenthal posted a video comment on the registration for EHR Incentive programs

This is substantially higher than a recent set of stats that had the rates posted much lower. This is good news all round if the incentive program has stimulated that much interest and desire to move towards the digitization of the medical record which for Stage 7 has barely reached double digits according to the most recent HIMSS Analytics assessment of EHR implementations.

For those wanting more information
Information about the incentive payments program is available on the CMS website and the Regional Extension Centers (RECs) technical assistance is available at the HealthIT web site. So for those still pondering if this is worthwhile investment it seems that healthcare systems and your clinical peers see this as a valuable and positive move. Do you want to watch the train leave the station or be on it?